Monday, 18 August 2008

Monday Memo 3

Note to self: Just because I'm tempted to kill off all my characters and start a new story from scratch doesn't mean I can stop trying to re-write my current WIP.

Re-writing inevitably tempts me to drop my current WIP and work on a different - bright and shiney idea instead. That's a bit what it's like at the moment.

The BDSM story I mentioned last Monday - the one I thought might have to be 2/3 re-written? Guess what? It needs to be 2/3 re-written. The main female character - Charlotte - went through two complete personality transformations - quite impressive considering the story is only a novella length.

Here's what it's like reading through my first draft:

Chapter 1 - Charlotte is a nervous little thing who's scared of her own shadow.

Chapter 2 - Charlotte isn't scared of anything, but she also doesn't have any emotions at all.

Chapter 3 - Damn, this is the Charlotte I should have been writing from the begining!

So, I just have to make the Charlotte who finally decided to show up in Chapter 3 turn up at the start of the book. Only pretty much every scene needs a complete over hall to do that.

The main male character - Zachariah - well, the poor man has been a very well behaved character. He turned up when he was supposed to. Took on a very nice personality - very dominant, more than a little kinky, but quite happy to fall head over heels with Charlotte when given the appropriate cue. And he stayed consistant all the way through the first draft.

Me and Charlotte really need to stop messing him around and give Zachariah the type of story he deserves. I'm hoping to finish the re-write over the next few days ready to edit it next month.What else am I supposed to remember to tell you?

This months editing projects.

One is gone - the Christmas Anthology submission. I won't get a response on that until a few weeks after the cut off date, but it's out of my control now, so I feel better about that.

The other one has been extended by a few thousand words, but the bulk of the editing is still left to do. Still keeping my fingers crossed it will be off by the end of the month.

And that brings me to what I said I would talk about last Monday. The Perfect Timing series. The end of the month submission is the second story in the series - the first is You First, which I told you about a week or so ago - this second one is a m/f novella, BDSM again.

It will be the first m/f one I send off to my editor, so I'm a little bit nervous about it. But since I write about 50% m/f, I have to send one off at some point.

The rest of the Perfect Timing series alternates between m/f and m/m. If they stay in the order they are in, there'll be four novellas, followed by two novels, followed by the same again.

That's it for today. No matter how long I make this post, I will have to do the re-writing at some point, so I might as well get on with it now.

No idea what I'll be talking about next Monday - or even on Wednesday come to that. We'll just have to wait and see :)

2 comments:

Rewrites do suck. :P I'm about a third through one dark fantasy novel and finally over the loathable first section... and then of course I realize that as soon as I finish this revision, I have to do a third to fix world building and structure and whatnot... ARG. :P